The Dutch Girl Read Online Free PDF Page B

ones where her students showed off their progress on the harpsichord and the dance floor. She had chosen to wear them to Harenwyck precisely becausethey were inappropriate, because they would mark her as the city creature she pretended to be.
    And because they were not
klompen
.
    The carriage was an elegant four-seater with black lacquer pillars and gilded panels, the doors emblazoned with the Van Haren coat of arms: a black wolf grasping a dead lamb in its jaws on a yellow shield, doubtless “earned” from some medieval feat of butchery.
    Her personal possessions and those items of school equipment too delicate to ride atop the coach were heaped on the seat beside her: a basket of embroidery floss to occupy her on the journey, the atlas she used to teach geography, the book of engravings that her students sketched copies from, the standing loom for large projects, and a box of fine paints imported from London.
    On the bench opposite, facing backward because he had insisted that she have the finer perch, sat Theunis Ten Broeck, Andries Van Haren’s estate manager and “man of business.”
    He had called on Anna, as predicted, the day after Kate Grey. Ten Broeck was a genial, lively man in his fifties who, unlike Kate Grey, had expressed delight over everything in the house. In a mellow baritone—whose guttural
R
’s and staccato rhythms recalled the language of her childhood—he had praised every detail in Anna’s needlework landscape: the fine trees, the little ducks, the fishing lady and her beau, the stately house and well-kept grounds. He had declared the tight little parlor they used for dancing practice a “grand space for a whirl.” The skylit attic where she taught painting was a“dazzling aerie,” the kitchen a “testament to sound home management.”
    The estate manager, it turned out, had three daughters, and was keenly interested in the latest ideas in female education. He wanted his girls to be able to compete for husbands with the fashionable young women in New York. “To marry better than their unfortunate mother did,” he said with a twinkle in his eye. But his silk suit and clocked stockings and the silver buckles on his shoes told Anna that Ten Broeck had done well for himself at Harenwyck. His daughters would have good portions to take into their marriages, and a little city polish went a long way for a girl with money. Anna had never envied her students that. Not the money. It was the love their parents lavished on them that she coveted, the thought and care and
caution
invested in their futures.
    Ten Broeck had also sung the praises of the patroon’s new house on the estate, the fine English mansion that had replaced the old Dutch cottage which had itself seemed so grand to Anna. But Ten Broeck was uncharacteristically silent on the subject of the patroon and his nieces. It didn’t matter. She had already decided to accompany him back to Harenwyck. It was that, or wait for the bailiffs to appear at her door, and she had decided a long time ago that she would always meet fate head-on.
    All the same, her heart had ached when she stood on the stoop of the house, looking back at Mrs. Peterson and Miss Demarest and the girls—even the troublesome Mary Phillips—assembled to bid her farewell. The school was in good hands with Miss Demarest. Annahad no fears on that account. It was what might happen if Anna was found out as Annatje Hoppe that terrified her. The school would be destroyed, along with the reputations of her friends and colleagues. The only way to safeguard the academy’s future—and her own—was to journey into her past, to Harenwyck.
    The carriage trundled through the early-morning streets of New York, past the soldiers, who were everywhere now, always searching the docks for extra work. Their red coats made the merchants feel safe, but the mechanics and laborers resented the competition, and Anna had